Bosnian language in the context of "Ottoman Turkish"

The Bosniaks in North Macedonia (Macedonian: Бошњаци, Bosnian: Bošnjaci / Бошњаци) number 17,018 people according to the 2002 census. The population is largely concentrated in and around the capital Skopje, but also in the municipalities of Veles and Dolneni.

Bosniaks, often referred to as Bosnian Muslims, are a South Slavic ethnic group and nation native to Bosnia and Herzegovina. They share a common ancestry, culture, history and the Bosnian language; and traditionally and predominantly adhere to Sunni Islam. The Bosniaks constitute significant native communities in Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and Kosovo as well. Largely due to displacement stemming from the Bosnian War and Genocide in the 1990s, they also form a significant diaspora with several Bosniak communities across Europe, the Americas and Oceania.

Bosniaks are typically characterised by their historic ties to the Bosnian historical region, adherence to Islam since the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Bosnian language. Bosniaks have also frequently been denoted Bosnian Muslims in the Anglosphere mainly owing to this having been the primary verbiage used in the media coverage of the Bosnian War during the 1990s. Bosniaks self-identified simply as Muslims in a national sense until 1993, when their leading political Party of Democratic Action adopted the term Bosniak. The earlier term, Bosnian Muslim, is considered problematic today when used as an ethnic descriptor rather than a religious one. Bosniaks may also often simply be referred to as Bosnians. However, this term is understood to denote all inhabitants of Bosnia and Herzegovina (regardless of ethnic identity) or apply to citizens of the country.

Serbo-Croatian, also known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.

South Slavic languages historically formed a dialect continuum. The region's turbulent history, particularly due to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, led to a complex dialectal and religious mosaic. Due to population migrations, Shtokavian became the most widespread supradialect in the western Balkans, encroaching westward into the area previously dominated by Chakavian and Kajkavian. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs differ in religion and were historically often part of different cultural spheres, although large portions of these populations lived side by side under foreign rule. During that period, the language was referred to by various names, such as "Slavic" in general, or "Serbian", "Croatian" or "Bosnian" in particular. In a classicizing manner, it was also referred to as "Illyrian".

Serbian is the standard variety of the Serbo-Croatian language mainly used by Serbs. It is the official and national language of Serbia, one of the three official languages of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and co-official in Montenegro and Kosovo. It is a recognized minority language in Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Serbian is based on the most widespread dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian (more specifically on the dialects of Šumadija-Vojvodina and Eastern Herzegovina), which is also the basis of standard Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin varieties. Reflecting this shared basis, the Declaration on the Common Language of Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Montenegrins was issued in 2017. The other dialect spoken by Serbs is Torlakian in southeastern Serbia, which is transitional to Macedonian and Bulgarian.

Sandžak (Serbian: Санџак; Bosnian: Sandžak) is a historical and geo-political region in the Balkans, located in the southwestern part of Serbia and the eastern part of Montenegro. The Bosnian/Serbian term Sandžak derives from the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a former Ottoman administrative district founded in 1865. Sandžak is inhabited by a plurality of ethnic Bosniaks.

Various empires and kingdoms have ruled over the region. In the 12th century, Sandžak was part of the region of Raška under the medieval Serbian Kingdom. During the Ottoman territorial expansion into the western Balkans in a series of wars, the region became an important administrative district, with Novi Pazar as its administrative center. Sandžak was under Austro-Hungarian occupation between 1878 and 1909 as a garrison, until an agreement between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire resulted in the withdrawal of Austro-Hungarian troops from Sandžak in exchange for full control over Bosnia. In 1912, it was divided between the Kingdom of Montenegro and the Kingdom of Serbia.

Arabic has had a great influence on other languages, especially in vocabulary. The influence of Arabic has been most profound in those countries visited by Islam or Islamic power.

Arabic loanwords have made into many languages as diverse as Abkhaz, Afrikaans, Amharic, Albanian, Armenian, Assyrian, Azerbaijani, Balochi, Bengali, Berber, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chechen, Circassian, Croatian, English, French, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Kazakh, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Malay, Mongolian, Montenegrin, Nepali, Odia, Ossetian, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romani, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sicilian, Spanish, Sindhi, Somali, Swahili, Tagalog, Tajik, Tatar, Tigrinya, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek, Visayan, Wolof, Xhosa, Yoruba, Zulu, as well as other languages in countries where these languages are spoken. Other languages such as Maltese and Nubi derive from Arabic, rather than merely borrowing vocabulary. Arabic words were being used from the Iberian Peninsula all the way to Maritime Southeast Asia prior to the spread of European international words.

The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (Serbian: Српска ћирилица / Srpska ćirilica, IPA: [sr̩̂pskaː t͡ɕirǐlitsa]), also known as the Serbian script, (Српско писмо, Srpsko pismo, Serbian pronunciation: [sr̩̂psko pǐːsmo]), is a standardized variation of the Cyrillic script used to write Serbo-Croatian, namely its Serbian and Bosnian (mainly in Republika Srpska) standard varieties. It originated in medieval Serbia and was significantly reformed in the 19th century by the Serbian philologist and linguist Vuk Karadžić.

The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet is one of the two official scripts used to write modern standard Serbian, the other being Gaj's Latin alphabet. Karadžić based his reform on the earlier 18th-century Slavonic-Serbian script. Following the principle of "write as you speak and read as it is written" (piši kao što govoriš, čitaj kao što je napisano), he removed obsolete letters, eliminated redundant representations of iotated vowels, and introduced the letter ⟨J⟩ from the Latin script. He also created new letters for sounds unique to Serbian phonology. Around the same time, Ljudevit Gaj led the standardization of the Latin script for use in western South Slavic languages, applying similar phonemic principles.

The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as the Dayton Agreement or the Dayton Accords (Serbo-Croatian: Dejtonski mirovni sporazum / Дејтонски мировни споразум), and colloquially known as the Dayton (Bosnian: Dejton; Serbian: Дејтон / Dejton), is the peace agreement ending the three-and-a-half-year-long Bosnian War, an armed conflict part of the larger Yugoslav Wars. It was signed on 21 November 1995 in Dayton, Ohio, United States, at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It was re-signed ceremonially in Paris, France on 14 December 1995.

The warring parties agreed to peace and to a single sovereign state known as Bosnia and Herzegovina composed of two parts: the largely Serb-populated Republika Srpska and mainly Croat-Bosniak-populated Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia and Herzegovina entered into the related arms control treaty, the Florence Agreement, in 1996 under the Accords. The Dayton followed the Washington Agreement, signed the year prior, in collective efforts to delineate the country's geography.